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Why is WCAG and ADA Compliance is Important for Bloggers

Blog accessibility and user activity on your site is something many site owners and bloggers are often writing about. However, more often than not, it’s all about the importance of using the right navigation, web hosting platform, WordPress themes and making sure your site is mobile-optimized.

These are all important factors, but they don’t address a common issue that is often forgotten about on a daily basis. And that is, web accessibility for people with disabilities. Such conditions are currently affecting millions of people in the world today, many of whom have likely visited your site.

Such disabilities can be anything from auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech and visual-based. With so many different conditions out there, it can be tough to make sure your site fits the needs of each user, along with the many new guidelines and rules in effect.

The important thing here, is that you not only understand there is a huge audience out there that has such problems that need to be catered to, but that it’s also your responsibility to make sure your is ADA compliant.

In this article, we are going to cover the basics of what you need to know about each of these accessibility developments, and how you can provide a better site experience for your audience across the board. We will also touch on the complications of not being compliant, and how simple to get your own site compliant within 48 hours.

What is WCAG and ADA Compliance and Why Does It Matter?

As a site owner, you focus on the keywords, anchor text and images used within your content. However, what if your audience can’t see your text because it’s too small, can’t view the content because they colors are all over the place, or they can’t read the content because you don’t have a text-to-audio transcription process in place?

If any of these sound off the wall to you and site usage, they aren’t. Instead, they are actually problems that individuals with disabilities deal with on a daily basis. And just like they have a right to visit and shop at any retail store or location they like, the same applies to online websites, blogs and brands.

With this being said, WCAG and ADA compliance is all about making sure these best practices and solutions are in place for all audiences. For those brands who aren’t compliant, there are some hefty fees and regulations already in place. Even more important, the action against companies that aren’t yet compliant, are quickly on the rise.

Just like how every person has a right to visit a location of business in the offline world, the same is true for that of the internet as well. For businesses and brands that don’t have such capabilities and features in place, it would be seen the same way as if a retail location didn’t have an entry rank for wheelchair accessibility.

So what’s a site owner or brand to do? Simple. Get compliant.

Depending on the type of site you have or the services you offer, it might be a difficult process to manually make changes to your site to cater to everyone’s needs–while also hitting all of the necessary data points within the web content accessibility guidelines here.

However, if this is something you want to take on as a task, there is a three three-step process recommended by accessibe.com to check for compliancy on websites.

We’ll start by testing how compatible your website is for being used only by a keyboard. From navigation to operation.

We’ll use a free testing tool called WAVE to evaluate various types of common accessibility issues.

We’ll download and test your website with a screen-reader called NVDA, which is an assistive technology software used by blind people. Screen-readers are the central topic in 99% of lawsuits.

Even with this recommended manual process laid out for you, most sites are still not going to be WCGA or ADA compliant out of the box — which means there often isn’t a reason to go through each of the three steps above and find that your site isn’t compliant in the first place. Instead, it’s more often a case of finding a solution to make your site compliant and speeding up the process.

For more site owners and brands, the concept of WCAG and ADA compliance isn’t just completely new to them, it often also can seem like a headache and is quite confusing. The good news is, you aren’t alone in this thought process. Just like how WordPress made the process of going live with a site extremely fast and easy, the same can be said about getting your site compliant in just minutes.

With this same mentality in place, accessiBe created an all-in-one platform that makes it extremely easy for any website, blog or online store to become ADA and WCAG compliant–all without needing to redesign your site or pay for thousands of dollars in developer and coding fees.

Thanks to their web accessibility tool and AI-learning platform, websites can now be compliant within 24 hours and at a much lower investment than you might think.

For a quick three-minute demo on this process and all of the features offered by accessiBe’s web accessibility tool, check out the short video below.

5 Steps to Becoming ADA and WCAG Compliant

Create a newaccount on accessiBe.com and install their single line of JS code

The platform will then instantly display their accessibility tool on your site

Through advanced AI technology, accessiBe will scan your site

Within 48 hours, their AI is finished and your site is compliant

New scans take place every 24 hours, checking for new content

Best of all, site owners of all sizes can get started with a 7-day free trial. After that, annual plans start at just $490, which is peanuts compared to some of the fines being issues for not having a compliant website. Not to mention, having such features and tools in place to help your audience better navigate through your site, will likely increase engagement numbers and revenue across the board.

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